


Keeping Initiative

by newsbypostcard



Category: X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) - Fandom, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-08
Updated: 2014-06-08
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:27:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At once, the tension breaks; you feel like you can breathe again. You’ve built all this up, of course; you’re wrong to think he’s not by your side, to think he isn’t your dearest ally. After all, he’s never used his powers against you.</p><p>You have always so urgently wanted him to be good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Initiative

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for mental illness consistent with XM:DOFP, drowning, alcoholism, deathwish/suicidal references, nihilism, passing references to war (including WWII and the Holocaust, as well as Vietnam), and the usual violence, sex, and language.

* * *

  


You used to tell yourself that the key was to see the man behind the weapon. 

But then, of course, you used to tell yourself very many foolish things, didn’t you?

  


* * *

  


“You know, Charles,” Raven tells you, “if I didn’t know any better I’d think you were developing a work ethic.”

If you didn’t know any better, you might’ve thought the same; but you do know better, after all. It’s a moral compass you’re actually developing -- something that burst suddenly through your chest alongside the aggravation of reading yet another moron’s answer while in ethics class and disagreeing with it outright. It’s hard to keep top of the class without doing any of the work when everyone else is so very clearly fucking _wrong_ about everything; and actually, if you’re being honest, the accident of developing an ethical framework for your powers whilst actually in ethics class seems a little bit beautiful.

You look at Raven staring back at you, blonde and rosy and soft round the edges. She uses her powers to get by instead of to slack off like the wanker you are, and now you’re about to tell her that no, actually, you were just finally putting barely enough work in to demonstrate to the class that you’re actually cleverer once and for all?

“You know, Raven,” you say instead, “I think you might be right”; and if she’s there with you when you graduate with your professorship another seven years later, it’s almost certainly because she helped you along.

  


* * *

  


“You’re the only one who can control him,” Hank says.

It’s offhand, nothing behind it, meant only to imply that you’re meant to bring him down from whatever he’s worked himself into this time; but you flush anyway, halfway embarrassed and halfway full of wild, inexplicable anger. “That’s not true,” you reply shortly; and then you leave the conversation, not caring if it’s awkward, not caring if it’s improper, needing only to escape.

Leaving to avoid elabouration is an art you soon perfect, and it’s not long at all before leaving is replaced by deflection, by flippant remarks, by arrogant demonstrations of grandeur and superiority, with Erik at your side. In these moments, when he’s present, he moves closer to you, grinning in that way that gets to you, slides under your skin, gets your blood pumping faster, starts you in on a smirk of your own; and god help you, god _help_ you, does no one at all realize that _he’s_ the one who controls _you_?

  


* * *

  


It’s a desperate sound that leaves your lips, something jagged that bursts from within your chest. It might be laughter, you realize, suddenly reeling with it; it spills over you, tightens your vocal chords, makes you feel cold. 

“He’s where he belongs.” 

You bite it out, meaning it, feeling every goddamn syllable; but it doesn’t help the chill. Nothing helps the chill, lately.

You shut your eyes for just a moment and feel the smile turning to a grimace, something ugly, something fitting, on your face. There’s a glass in your hand -- you’ve poured yourself a drink already, how thoughtful. One step fewer between you and the required oblivion. You’re forever thankful to your former self for having such foresight.

It’s been nearly five years since the school shut down, and over twice that long since you last were anywhere near him; yet still, from far beneath the Pentagon, he controls you. Still he forces your reactions. Still he reduces you to this hollow remnant of a man. 

Hank tells you you don’t need it, this drink that’s in your hand, just as he says it about the ones that came before. He tells you it interacts with your treatment. He tells you, in his way, that you’re a burnout and a fool and far too smart a man to be acting this way; but you’ve long since given up, long since let it all go in an effort to let go even of the best of the memories. You’ll pour yourself a drink into eternity if it means you never have to remember any smile he ever shot you, any memory you captured out of his head as though it had been your own, any moment you’d shared, any chess game you’d played, his lips on your skin, your palm over his cock; yet nothing helps, not even the drink, thanks to too many nights together spent staring out over the countryside with one hand wrapped around a glass full of scotch while the other wrapped around your own thigh, pretending it was his.

“We all have to die sometime,” you hear yourself say, imagining a war you never wanted and cannot grasp; and as you turn, part of you wonders if you haven’t already fought it in a different sense -- if, in a way, you haven’t been dead ten years already.

  


* * *

  


“There’s going to be another war, Charles.”

It’s quiet but intentional, and he says it with shoulders risen high above his back. You look up to see he’s staring at the board, seemingly focused, all pretense; and it’s the first time you think these chess games might serve more purposes than what has already occurred to you.

“Hmm?” you say, before you fully realize what he’s said; then, startled, “What?” You try to get into his line of sight, ducking awkwardly in front of him. “What war, Erik?”

“There will be more.” His voice is too low in his throat, and you retreat immediately from the thought of reading his mind, meanwhile beating back the feeling of thrill trilling away at your heart at the descent of his voice. “After Shaw, there will always be more. And when they come, we will have to fight.” 

At last he looks at you, eyes wide, brow furrowed, hands clasped between his knees like he’s not sure where they go; and you change your mind, suddenly, take his earnestness as an invitation to step forward into his head.

You see it all: Flashes of his parents in queues, marked for their race, and of Erik alongside; flashes of violence, of his mother being shot; flashes of Erik being struck, of a boy screwing up his face only to finally, at long last, be able to manipulate the coin on cue; and you shut your eyes tighter against it all, feeling it, looking for hope within it and finding the task almost too difficult to fathom.

“You understand, don’t you?” he asks you, forcing you to break back out of his mind. It’s urgent in a way that makes you wish you could reach out for him, to close the distance between you in a fashion more palpable than telepathy; and you refocus, searching his gaze.

You take a moment to think, because: Do you? Do you understand? You understand him; you understand the way he thinks; you understand a nihilism within him you’ve never possessed. You understand that all you’ve just witnessed was the process of making him into a weapon, with war so deeply ingrained in him that he may never override it. You understand you’ll never hold his dispositions, will never possess these tendencies for mayhem that are overridden only by a sense of principle, a committal to a people -- and you understand that a focus on trying to undo all this, trying to fix the hardship he’s been through by meeting violence with violence, is another thing you don’t, will never be able to grasp.

“There isn’t going to be another war, Erik,” you reply after a time, intending to be encouraging. You say it with the intention of letting him know that things are different this time, that he isn’t working alone any longer, that you’re all in this together, that war isn’t the default option anymore; but the way his face shuts down as it returns to the board tells you you’ve failed, tells you you’ve made a mistake, tells you he’s taken it to mean you don’t understand at all.

“All right,” is all he says, and your ears burn red for reasons unknown.

It’s enough to keep you out of his head again, for a while.

  


* * *

  


In the second after you first see him, he’s saying your name.

The second after that, you punch him in the face. 

You might’ve known he was coming, but you couldn’t have known he’d use your name against you like that. You couldn’t have known he still knew the weapons at his disposal, after all this time. You couldn’t have known he’d have recognized you in a heartbeat, the way you looked, the way you stood, ten years after your eyes had last met. You couldn’t have known, and yet you should’ve realized; and now you’ve led with your fist, physical strength suddenly the only force you have to use against the reality that he is standing before you. 

Your hand connects against the far side of the lift, supporting your weight as your legs momentarily betray you in a way altogether unrelated to your paralysis; and then it feels better, with pain shooting through your hand instead of ripping through your gut, and you realize that maybe violence _is_ sometimes the answer.

You shake out your hand and he’s staring up at you, on the floor where he belongs. He doesn’t bother with questions, doesn’t bother with apologies, doesn’t bother to look shocked that you’ve struck him; he only presses the back of his finger to his open mouth, looking up at you with wide eyes conveying something you’d rather not see, and you’re torn between holding his gaze and turning away for good.

“Good to see you, old friend,” he says, lip red and already threatening to swell; and suddenly you’re breathing, breathing, only breathing, trying not to tear your hair out at how he looks exactly the same -- clean shaven, clean lines, after ten years alone and imprisoned.

You bite back a bitter remark -- _It’s indecent to look so poised; don’t you know there’s a war going on?_ \-- and force yourself to stabilize. Something’s about to come to a head, and you’re the levelheaded one -- aren’t you? At least you used to be, and with you in your suit and him in his colourless coveralls it’s hard not to read the situation that way; but from the way his eyes search you from where he sits, where you’ve put him, where you’ve struck him down, you think you might not be the more together, between the two of you. Not anymore.

“No killing,” you warn almost immediately -- an imperative burned into you long ago and one he’s never truly learned. 

He scoffs his amusement, infuriating you again; and you set your jaw against the knowing realization that you’re forcing him to make a promise you both know he isn’t going to keep. “No helmet,” he says easily, too casually, instead of making any pretense that he might make the effort. “I couldn’t disobey you even if I wanted.”

“I am never,” you begin, voice shaking despite the strength of your attention on preventing that exact outcome, “getting inside that head again.”

The expression is inscrutable as he looks at you while you try to make him promise, probably in vain, that he isn’t going to kill anyone; and maybe, you realize suddenly, the mistrust is mutual. Maybe there was always more than power between you after all, with the way he still looks at you as though the power of telepathy is his -- because you don’t need your powers to be able to recognize that he thinks you’re lying, too.

  


* * *

  


“It’s a good thing we oppose each other only in chess,” you say, half-chuckling. 

It’s in part to keep the tension from settling in your chest as the game intensifies, as Erik’s power grows to overtake the room with each piece he wills to move. The words break between you, sudden, jarring, an unwelcome interruption; and across from you, half a world away, he only blinks at the board, ears perking to process your words. 

You wait for him to look up at you, grinning; you wait for him to meet your eye, to assure you: It’ll never come down to you versus him in any other context. You wait for him to tell you, through some allusion to a mutual enemy, that he’ll be by your side forever. You wait for the assurance you didn’t know you’d been waiting for until now; you wait for a statement of loyalty, wait for something, anything, please -- some corporeal acknowledgement of something more than what being in his head tells you.

But moments pass while he only blinks at the board, refusing to meet your eye; and it’s another moment still before he looks up at you at last, expression blank, while he says nothing.

You wait two seconds for his reply, for that grin, or at least for a throwaway joke about being formidable opponents. But nothing comes.

Something pulls deep in your gut when you realize it’s never _going_ to come.

He only stares at you, wordless, and you feel suddenly very foolish and very young. You’ve gone and said something extremely stupid, only you can’t place what part of it was the problem. It’s been years since you’ve felt this way, the last time surely stemming from your early years in biology when failed experiments felt like a failure of personhood; and now, all this time later, all it takes is a look from him to inspire the shame of inexperience within you. 

But you manage to keep steady. You stare back, elbows propped over your knees, trying not to let the sensation of humiliation creep further up than your neck as you wonder what you’ve missed. “Or not,” you mutter, chastising, hoping to turn this into a joke to save your reputation as a man who’s seen the world for what it is; and at last he looks away.

He’s staring off into the corner, as though examining the mantle, stilling as though daring you to read him. You only look, eyes tracing the line of his jaw as you fight to keep the redness out of your face; and it’s all you need to see to know that you’ve been naive, that you misunderstood him, that he truly would sacrifice any individual for his imagined ‘higher cause’, if needed.

He turns back to face you eventually, though he holds your gaze for only a second; then, slowly, he looks at the board, reaches forward, and moves the pawn by hand.

At once, the tension breaks; you feel like you can breathe again. You’ve built all this up, of course; you’re wrong to think he’s not by your side, to think he isn’t your dearest ally. After all, he’s never used his powers against you.

You have always so urgently wanted him to be good.

  


* * *

  


The bullets miss you, with your hand on his chest.

You feel his heart beating in his ribcage and resist the urge to punch him again. Instead, at the earliest possible convenience, you clench your fist around the nearest glass of scotch. 

It’s not long after that when you find yourself staring him down the extension of his arm as it drapes arrogantly over the sofa in your jet, and you’re furious. You find your eyes boring into his skull as you turn the glass over and over in your hand; and you realize that you might be trying to access his thoughts, though you know perfectly well you haven’t got your powers.

The situation is unbelievably fucking cruel, on the whole.

Death has such a peculiar sense of humour.

  


* * *

  


It had been one of those friendships that was far too easy to fall into.

Once you’ve been in a man’s head, you don’t tend to forget him; but there was something in the rhythm of his thoughts, even as he’d been drowning, that had helped you understand him even better than the average. Erik was a man driven, a man with a cause, a man with a purpose, and you respected that from day one. He might truly have drowned if you hadn’t pulled him up, such was the depth of his devotion; and it scared you and attracted you at once.

“Are you all right?” you’d asked him after, a towel wrapped around him in a meagre effort at getting him dry; and he’d looked at you, not bothering to conceal something vulnerable lurking in his eyes, drawing you in.

“Fine,” he’d replied blandly; and somehow that had drawn you in yet further.

There was something in saving a man’s life that formed a bond between you, whether you wanted one or not; and it seemed that when that man found something in you, something you represented to him that he had never before considered, that bond tended to solidify. You offered him a glimpse of a world he’d never seen before -- a community built on exceptional abilities, where your powers are gifts and not weapons, instead something to found a family upon; and in return, he offers you a rivalry you hadn’t previously known was possible.

After years of being top of the class, you find you’re unaccustomed to being challenged, but he challenges you almost as a matter of principle, as though testing himself against you. Your failure to break endears you to him further, as his failure to compromise endears him to you; and within a matter of weeks you’re spending all your waking hours together, tracking down others like you, playing another round of chess, or else just wasting time. 

Even as you build this family, you’re oddly retired from the rest, you and he, as though you were forming an elite class of your own even apart from those who share your gifts; and it’s a wonderful thing, to hold such a secret shared by only one another.

You wondered, in the early days, whether it was each other’s power that had truly brought you together; but it turned out that he was a brilliant man, a fascinating character, a compatible ally, and a formidable friend. In addition to being more than a match for you, all this was all the better; and you thrived in it, the bond you’d formed. It had been a friendship based in bettering each other, in the beginning; and later, when you look back on all this, you’ll wonder how you could’ve possibly missed the signs.

  


* * *

  


“Stop that,” he tells you, harshly.

You open your mouth to deny or question, maybe both at once; but you’d been scanning his mind, something idle, almost accidental, so you close it again, silent. “Sorry,” you mutter anyway, then feel immediately stupid; you both know better than that.

His eyes flicker up to meet yours, then return to the board, letting several moments pass unperturbed -- but then: “Have you noticed, Charles,” he begins in a low, controlled tone, “that I’ve played this entire game without lifting a finger?”

You blink; anxiety builds, inexplicably, in your chest. “I had.”

A bishop moves of its own accord, placing you in check, and still he won’t look at you. “That’s what makes us exceptional, isn’t it?” Something in the air piques the hair on your arms, and at last you tear his gaze away to look again at the board. “The ability we have,” he continues, “to manipulate our environment while ourselves remaining perfectly still.”

“That’s part of it, I suppose.” You reach for a pawn to block the bishop from your king’s line of sight, and there’s a tremor in the air.

“Do you ever wonder why we bother with the façade?” He moves quickly, shifting a knight into position, and you counter immediately. “Why we make gestures -- my hands through the air, your fingers to your temple -- as though any of it has any impact on our power?”

You clench your teeth and focus on matching him, move for move, rather than replying. Sometimes, when you read him, you get glimpses of other things – of a particularly strong impulse, of a surge of adrenaline – that leaves you staring across the board; and you prevent yourself from reading him again, now, afraid of what you might see. After all, there are always things you’re better off not knowing.

“Here’s my theory, Charles,” he begins again. He lifts a hand, then, and your eyes snap to it as he turns two fingers in the air. You move to catch his eye and find him staring at you pointedly; on the board, his king castles with his queenside rook. 

“You see?” 

There’s something fragile and dangerous in his voice, and you force your breathing to steady as you carry his gaze. “When I gesture, there seems to be more behind the movement, doesn’t there?” His lips purse, a motion so careful and restrained for something involuntary, before they crack into a smile, thin and threatening. “There’s something more that seems to happen than there would have been if I had sat perfectly still and done the same thing. The power is the same, but the gesture makes it seem _stronger_.” 

The smile turns into a grin, and your eyes don’t catch his anymore; instead they count his teeth, as though trying to avoid acknowledging the fact that the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. “Isn’t that remarkable?” he asks.

Your jaw quirks with the effort of keeping bile from rising in your throat, and you return your eyes to the board. “That’s one word for it,” you mutter, “but I fail to see how it’s relevant—“

“You, Charles, on the other hand,” he interrupts, “put your fingers to your temple because it allows you to _conceal_ your true power.” That broken grin again, a terrible thing, and you realize, quite suddenly, that you’re dealing with the weapon. “That way, sitting poised and cross-legged in your pretentious wingback chair, choosing not to move your hand as people expect of you, you can read people’s thoughts without them noticing – at least,” he chuckles darkly, “of people who don’t know you the way that I do.”

There’s a chill in your spine, but still you hold his gaze. “I suppose that’s the difference between you and I, Erik,” you say quietly.

He scoffs then, humourlessly, and moves another piece too quickly across the board with a flick of his finger. You see the checkmate immediately, shocked that he’s managed it in only sixteen moves; and you blink up at him as he rises from his chair. “That’s not the difference between you and I, Charles,” he replies darkly, his hands balled at his sides; “but despite what you may think, we’re not actually so very different.”

When his expectant stare is met with your silence, he turns on his heel and leaves the room without another word; and you wonder, faintly, how it always seems he’s able to read your mind better than you can read his.

  


* * *

  


He corners you before you land, and it’s almost a chaste thing.

The thing about chess is that it tells so much more about a man than you could’ve ever imagined. You learn, for example, that your powers probably helped you more than you ever knew. He beats you easily, too easily, for a man who last played a decade prior; but you should have known, when he offered to play you, that you weren’t going to find your victory here.

Yet for whatever’s going on in your mind to leave you in such shambles, you’d really thought you could’ve still at least beaten him here. You thought that this is where your advantage lay. You’re still miscalculating, after all this time; when will you ever fucking learn?

You stare at the mate and feel anger creeping in again. You wonder if you made a mistake, believing him, forgiving him so easily; you wonder if there is any man within him to forgive; and he says your name as you cover your eyes with your hand, too tired to keep track of truth from fiction. 

With a fervent grunt you push back from the table and rise, as quickly as your legs will allow, to move away from him; but naturally, he follows -- rises to meet you, a hand on your arm. 

“Charles,” he says.

For a moment, you’re frozen, stuck looking at the way his fingers have wrapped around you, a gesture too simple to be so intimate; then, you wrench away. “Good game,” you mutter, all sportsmanship, catching his eye; and your gaze hangs on his lips. There’s that flutter of restraint, that gentle pull inwards, that used to get you so bothered, and you turn away rather than try to coax anything out of him.

It’s his hand on your arm again, spinning you around. “Charles,” he says, searching.

“I’d like to be alone, Erik, what d’you want?” Emotion hangs over you, made hazy by scotch, and you pull at your arm again only to have him hang on.

“Charles,” he says only; and this time it hits somewhere deep within you.

You shove at him, because punching him again seems excessive. “I’m not doing this with you,” you hiss furiously; but instead of stepping away, he only crowds you, sets one hand over your ribcage and steps forward as you move back.

You’re back against the wall of the baggage hold, somehow, your hands grasping at his shirt as though to push him away -- but you don’t. You only stand there, hands balled in fists, knuckles set against him as though you’d managed the violence you can only mimic; and you breathe, furiously, against the fingers gripping at your side.

“Charles,” he says, a low thing, the word barely clearing his throat as he leans in; and you let him.

He kisses you, lips certain and familiar over yours, and the moment splits in half. His hand tangles in your hair, thumb gliding over your bearded jawline as though familiarizing itself with new territory; and when you start to kiss him back, your hands alternate between pulling him in and pushing him away, still buried in his collar, knuckles whitening with the indecision.

It takes until your lungs are burning before you realize you’ve forgotten to breathe, and you find it in you to slide a hand over the back of his neck and pull him back by the nape. It’s a furious and possessive gesture, something meant to set the tone; but then, in its betrayal, you set your head against his as you heave to catch your breath. 

“Did you ever really love me,” you whisper, an inaudible plea hitched on to an exhale; but he catches it anyway, pulls away from you, his hands stilling against your form as he gives you a pained, searching look.

His mouth hangs open, and you can still taste the raw flesh around the cut on his lip from where your tongue had slipped over it. His lips recess again, just in that way, in that _way_ that they do when he has thoughts to keep in; and any answer he might’ve given you gets swallowed by the violent wrenching apart that follows Hank’s announcement of your arrival over Paris.

Your breath still comes to you harsh and ragged as you regard him from the other side of the corridor; your fists clench over air at your sides, your eye furiously holding his own. 

On the other side of the chamber, Logan shifts into wakefulness, and Erik’s focus is the first to break -- another of his victories, you feel.

“Better get moving then,” you say, feeling hollow. With his gaze slanted elsewhere, it’s easy to make your voice sound normal, despite numbness in your limbs; and it’s almost as easy to break position, when you can move again, to spin past him at last, without his hand on your arm to pull you back in.

  


* * *

  


The first time he kisses you, there isn’t any trigger. There isn’t any cause. Of all the times you’d thought about how it might begin -- out of frustration over a lost chess game; out of fury about how the other seems so blind; upon getting wildly drunk and offering simple declarations about how mad he drives you -- you never thought it’d begin for no particular reason.

It happens when you’re climbing the stairs one night, on your way to your respective bedrooms, having spent an hour drinking scotch and strategizing about how to best conclude the lessons. You’re muttering something inconsequential about tomorrow’s itinerary, and he’s nodding along; and then suddenly, at the foot of the stairs, there’s a careful sound from deep within his throat as though a stronghold of control has finally collapsed.

It’s his hand on your arm that stops you, spinning you around without warning; and before a protest is fully formed on your lips it’s lost in a moan, lost in his mouth, lost in a messy and confused tangle of teeth and tongue. It’s partway awful and partway exactly what you’d hoped it would be; but then his hands move you against the wall and hold you there, and it’s as though the world rights itself, your breathing finding rhythm, lips moving slowly, his tongue scanning over your lip as though mapping it out.

He pulls away, breathing heavily, and you move a hand to the back of his neck as though to convince him to stay. 

“Am I too forward?” he mutters; and it’s such an absurd question that you almost laugh.

“God, no,” you say instead, wrenching at his neck to meet his lips again to yours; and it’s barely another twenty seconds of figuring each other out before he’s deepened the kiss, leaned harder against you, brought a noise out from within you that would’ve been embarrassing if he hadn’t taken it in at once, and you respond in the only way imaginable by dragging him after you into your study.

  


* * *

  


You dream once that he’s laughing at you, with his hands on his hips and his teeth bared, clad in grey monochrome, whilst telling you that the main difference between his prison cell and yours is that yours is roomier. You wake in a dead sweat, with a fear filling you so intense that you think you’ve been paralyzed all over again; and despite Hank’s worried comments, you don’t sleep again for a long while.

  


* * *

  


When he pulls the gun on you, you’re barely surprised. 

In the end, your forgiveness had been fragile enough to shatter in an instant without the act swallowing you whole; and you think that when he shoots you you’ll feel just the right amount of betrayal, once again, in the form of lead searing its way into your skin.

But then the bullet veers around you -- aims for Raven instead -- and your reaction doesn’t hit you until you’ve long since left him, until you feel an ache in your spine where you’re not meant to have any feeling at all, until your legs collapse from under you in your entrance hall. It’s then that you realize once and for all that he’s still driven by his cause, regardless of any agreements he may have made to the contrary. It’s then you realize that he’d broken a tacit agreement not to try to kill anyone in a record six hours. It’s then you realize -- at long bloody last -- that you can’t give him an ounce of your trust any longer. It’s then you realize that he’s still willing to sacrifice everything, _anything_ , for an untenable future he once called ‘ours’; and finally, _finally_ , you think you understand that completely.

(It’s the way he’d said it, you realize, that had fooled you -- _ours_ , gravelled in your ear, the only promise he’d ever made you, the closest thing to sweet nothings he could offer. It had been uttered while you’d both been nude and therefore stupid, with one of his hands holding your head to his chest while the other stroked you off with maddening control despite the ineffectual bucking of your hips; and it’s so easy to believe someone, isn’t it, when you think you’re in love?)

  


* * *

  


In the end, you have only weeks together.

When you look back, you’ll wonder how such a short span of time could’ve possibly meant so much. In the midst of Shaw, in the midst of training, in the midst of learning the give and take of power and control, you could only find room to test against each other in fleeting moments. 

Yet in hindsight, the fleeting moments seem to expand, to fill the gaps and then some, to cover the weeks before Cuba in their entirety; and once it’s all done, weeks seem to span years, seem to dominate your life to date -- as though it had all been leading to the moments you had shared; as though it had all collapsed since.

The time you remember most is the one when you make eye contact with him across the room over breakfast and feel arousal stir within you at the expression he besets on you. It’s something bland, with a quirk in his brow, suggesting nothing concrete about more subdued goings on; and you blink at him, fighting to match his neutrality before stepping gently into his mind. 

Suddenly your senses are overwhelmed with an image of the world’s filthiest blowjob, with him on his knees under the kitchen table; and you understand that you’re meant to sit, back rigid, trying to be attentive in the middle of a conversation, and take it.

Back in reality, your jaw quirks; and you blink heavily as though focusing your eyes. _Well, now, that’s cheating,_ you scold him telepathically, staring sternly, trying to sound disapproving; but then he cocks an eyebrow, a lascivious gesture, and image invades again. It’s the same damn thing, you think at first, only to realize seconds later there’s now the feeling of cold metal adding an impossible pressure, working to at once to encourage and prevent the inevitability of your release; and heat pools deep in your gut.

You manage, somehow, to keep the shudder confined to your shoulders, even if you have to grip the counter to do it; and then you block him out, settling on leveling an even stare across the room, trying too hard to empty your features of expression to mask the blatant arousal you know must be blossoming over your face. He looks away at last, raising a cup of coffee level with his mouth in a pithy attempt at covering the grin that splits over his lips; and holy _fuck_ , god help you, you need an escape plan.

“All right,” you mutter, then pick up your own coffee and announce aloud you’re headed to your study for the hour; and when he saunters casually through the doors ten minutes later with his hands in his pockets, whistling idly with the air of a man who’s having the best day of his life, you damn well consider forcing him on his knees where he stands.

“Nefarious bastard,” are the only words that make it out of your mouth before you push him against the wall; and the breaths of his laughter glance over your face when you kiss him, making you love him at the same time that you’re tearing at him with the effort of getting what you want. It’s made worse still when his hands work into your hair and pull you in, close as possible, just to be able to delve deeper into your mouth; and though you manage to keep the sound of breaking silent in your throat, he still brings a tremor to your knees, and your hands grab at his wrists for support. 

You can tell he knows you love him by the way that he kisses you, telepathy be damned, for all you let him do to you, and you wish for your own sake you knew how to do better; only suddenly you don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care a lick. You’d tell him yourself, you think, if you could remember how to speak -- only he is on his knees now, his mouth teasing at your cock, and your remaining resolve is slipping away. 

As your grasp tightens in his hair, your grasp on language abandons you at last; so you opt instead to throw your head back, to allow the blue streak to swear its way out of your mouth, to throw a balled fist against the wall to support you if your legs truly do fail you for all the threats of collapse they’re giving -- and to ignore the upturn of the sides of his mouth as he swallows you down in one.

It’s the moments like these, strewn between work and teaching, between strategy sessions and arguments, that seem to stretch on over vast expanses of time. There’s the other times, too, that stick with you too long after they’re passed: where you get drunk on the floor of your kitchen and wind up arguing loudly, only to settle the matter with messy handjobs that take far too long for all the scotch you’ve imbibed; where you calmly command him into a closet to stand, stalk still and silent, while you suck him off in the midst of a spirited conversation about popular music being held by the other mutants on the door’s other side; where you erupted, maddened with frustration about how to proceed with Shaw, expecting him to argue with you, to wear you down, to try to convince you that his way is best -- only to have him lean you gently against the desk and kiss you, far more softly than you would’ve anticipated he’d ever bother to attempt, muttering encouragements against your lips and the skin of your neck about how you’d figure it out together.

And these are only the moments that stand out amidst all the average ones -- the glancing touches, the pointed stares, the chess games and conversations held late at night that turned seamlessly into sex without any tenuous thread of connection. It hadn’t been long, your time spent together; yet the memories seem to span on forever, grown to occupy impossible lengths of time, once he’s left you.

Eventually you come to understand that it hadn’t been a few weeks at all. In actuality, it had been a lifetime in the making. It was why you’d fallen into each other’s graces in the first place: You’d been waiting for each other for a long time. And for a few weeks, there you’d been; for a few weeks, you found the man behind the weapon.

Or so you’d thought. You spend a lot of time playing these memories over, in the months and years that follow, trying to discern whether he’d ever been with you at all or whether you’d been fucking a ticking time bomb the entire time; and you never really decide, that fact infuriating you more than the betrayal, sometimes.

In the end, for the few weeks had together, you’re both now locked away, ruined forever by what the other man has done to you -- and in that respect, you decide, you’re spending your whole lives together, no matter how much you may wish it wasn’t so.

  


* * *

  


The night before Cuba had been an odd night spent apart, with him keeping to the garden and with you in your study. It had been one of those nights where you sensed you weren’t sure you wanted to know what was going on in his head, and you’d stayed frosty, a bit removed, leading him to let you alone if only because he thought that’s what you had wanted. It was odd, keeping yourself separate from a part of him after everything you'd done together; and you returned to the old standby of reading a book in the effort to forget that he wasn’t here beside you because you were afraid of what was in his head.

It was some point after midnight when he'd appeared in the doorway, greeting you, “Charles,” in a tone unfamiliar; and you’d turned in your chair, tearing away from your book with surprise that he hadn’t already gone to bed. He’d had an expression on his face you couldn’t quite understand just by looking at it, you realized; but it looked similar to the one he’d worn when you’d pulled him out of the ocean months ago: something lost, concerned, a bit vulnerable in small doses.

“Erik?” you’d replied, brow knitting high on your head. You'd intentionally avoided your instinct to read him, to figure out what he was thinking; but as he'd stared at you, saying nothing, something told you that wasn’t what he wanted.

His expression closed, after a moment, while you continued to stare without reading him; and, his features displaying something like resignation, he'd sighed and let his hands fall to his sides. “Goodnight, Charles,” he’d said only, a protracted note to his voice that had warned you to stop him. 

But you hadn’t.

You’d watched instead; you’d let him walk away; and there won’t be a day in your life when you won’t wonder if it couldn’t have happened differently if you’d made a different choice.

  


* * *

  


After he’s left you again and you've remembered how to find hope in other people's minds, you spend days with Cerebro -- not many, just a few -- scanning for him, just to see if he’s there.

There’s a moment, just one, where you think you’ve found him. It’s an image you recognize, hand skating over thigh, following familiar lines until it grips and takes hold; it’s a name whispered desperately, it’s lips over flesh, it’s a voice cracking hard as control is left to abandon.

It’s one of those memories where, if they’d been there with you in person, you’d have had a difficult time not picking it up for the strength of emotion behind it. It’s one of those moments that defines a person, leaves other memories pale in comparison for the sights and smells and feel behind it. It’s one of those moments of such staggering intensity, of realization, of such passion that is felt once in a lifetime; and there’s something in it that makes you yearn for him, in naked ways you haven’t felt in years, as though you understood the moment you were seeing as something you knew.

But then the moment’s gone. It’s almost taken from your mind for how abruptly it’s withdrawn, whisked away as though mist, imagined; and though you try to find the thread, to get a more solid read, to understand what it is that’s affected you, it’s nowhere to be found.

You sit quietly for a long while, not moving, trying to place what you’ve seen. You shut off the machine for the silence it gives you, so you can sift through all the voices to find the one you’re looking for; but you’re still out of practice, and the image grows hazy, details fading quickly, making you uncertain.

You retreat to your study and stare at the chessboard, still set up as though waiting for someone; and you consider your motives carefully. You know, ultimately, why you’re looking for him -- it’s the unanswered questions that get to you the most, and there’s too many silences he’s still meant to fill -- but isn’t it true, you ask yourself at last, that you only wind up ignoring the answers you _are_ given?

You take another day -- one more day, you tell yourself -- to look; but you know, almost immediately, that you’ll never find him this way.

And though your finger does hesitate over the power button, you shut it all down.

After all -- he knows where to find you, when he’s ready.

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, this probably goes without saying, but herein is one interpretation of what happens when you put two unbelievably narcissistic, manipulative, god-complex types into a room: you get one volatile, violent, intensely co-dependent relationship! It's not intended as a model for goodness. Be kind to yourself and stay away from megalomaniacs.
> 
> 'Initiative' is a term in chess for the player with the advantage, who makes predominantly offensive rather than defensive moves. Initiative switches often within a single game of chess, unless the opponents are horrifically mismatched. It seemed fitting.
> 
> Finally, parts of this was originally written in the third person, but it didn't want to be written that way. It's also, obviously, written out of chronological order. I hope the format isn't too jarring.


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